USA > Vermont > Windham County > Rockingham > History of the town of Rockingham, Vermont, including the villages of Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Rockingham, Cambridgeport and Bartonsville, 1907-1957 with family genealogies > Part 25
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It was called the most beautiful park in Vermont in 1910 and folks came 35 miles to see it. It was so famous that the TIMES offered a prize of $10 for the best poem on it. The Swafford Stock Co. opened that season with a well-loved troupe including Miss Bessie Fox and Dollie Temple who starred in a matinee called The Rising Generation or Duffy's Jubilee before a packed house with A Fighting Chance on the program for the evening. The audience had it's money's worth for there were six specialty numbers also including Baby Fellows "one of the most versatile child artists on the American stage," and Master Harold Swafford, the 13 year-old character comedian and dancer. This company was so popular that it was booked ahead the preceding year by Manager Custer for the 1910 season. Lorne Elwyn and his company was always popular, putting on comedy and heavy drama with equal skill and the May Hillman Company with May doing her butterfly dance was a sure drawing card. In 1905 the Lyric Stock Co. filled the theater to bursting on the Fourth of July with all seats sold out by 7:30.
A long, open trolley always left the Square at 7 o'clock all summer on the nights when there was a play and dance at the Park. The band rode on this car, playing along the route and sometimes as many as six cars followed at intervals, for an hour,
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as people took the hint. In 1917 T. F. Kiniry was hired by the railroad to run the Rustic Theater. Bertha Swift remembers vividly the days when she played here for Bennett and Moulton when they put on East Lynne and when Whiteside and Strauss changed their repertoire three times a week. She remembers the first orchestra at the theater in May, 1909 of which she was a part and which was arranged through Mr. Kiniry with her husband, Leon, playing the drums, Ernest Bowen the French horn and Ned Taft the cornet. For many years the Park Orchestra specialized in their famous "band organ."
The Fourth of July and Labor Day were big days at the Park, too, with whole families gathering under the tall pines while children and adults cavorted among the swings, teeters, tennis courts, ball field, grandstand and cafe. There was a swimming pool for the children and tired mothers pushed them- selves back and forth in the chair swings. At one time there was what amounted to a small zoo with monkeys, prairie dogs, rabbits, peacocks, raccoons, foxes, with otter and ducks on the pond by the pavilion. There was even a polo field on the flats across the car tracks with many a fast and furious game played by local enthusiasts.
Each Fourth the cars were full from the first one in the morning until the last one dropped its weary load in the early morning hours. When the wooden seats on the open cars were jammed with people and lunch baskets, courageous males were sometimes allowed to stand on the long runningboards. And a sagacious small boy, looking to the future, might keep one ticket the whole season by always managing to be at the other end of the car when the conductor came around. At the Park, besides the usual attractions, there was always the 100-yard dash, the shot put, broad jumps and potato races on the ball field. The Fourth always meant fireworks and for many years Bernie Saatz, a little man of indeterminate age, arrived a week beforehand to build the huge set pieces, some of which had moving parts and all of which were immensely spectacular. He always remained to superintend the setting-off ceremonies to the last fountain and Roman candle.
But Labor Day really hit the jackpot with 300 autos in 1908 and the year before the cars were so crowded that the generators gave out and many tired travelers had to walk home. In 1912 a veranda was built around the pavilion in order that those on the outside might not interfere with those on the dance floor. The "privilege" of running this popular edifice was put up for bids each year by the railroad. The man who built the Pavilion, Frank Willard, died at the home of his son Ralph in Gageville in 1940 at the age of 94. Coming here in 1899 to work on the new Arch Bridge, he remained to construct many local homes. The store and cafe was run by Oscar Gam- mell for many years and was built by Jack Bryant also of Sax-
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tons River who ran it himself for some time, being the proprietor in 1921 when Miss Hannah Gove of Bellows Falls had charge of the amusements at the theater. The old building was later moved to form the nucleus of the present Highland Restaurant at the junction of Routes 5 and 103. In 1922 a golf course was planned for the Park.
One of the chief attractions for young and old was the thrill of the shoot-the-chute which was built by Charles Dionne of Saxtons River, brother of Joseph of Bellows Falls. The long, winding tunnel, waxed for speed, carried, beneath its curving roof, its passengers spinning down its snake-like-length, tossing them into the air at the bottom in a welter of flying petticoats and thrashing legs and often with burned elbows to carry home as souvenirs. This was installed in 1905 and was nameless until the popular cognomen attached itself to it.
The Park was also the spot for the annual outings of churches and organizations when wash tubs of ice became lemonade with busy women squeezing lemons while pine needles drifted into their brew. Whole bunches of bananas hung from the trees and mountains of sandwiches and chocolate cakes disappeared like the youngsters when they had finished their meal. The Baptists started their yearly Sunday School picnics there in 1908 and continued as long as the Park functioned as did most churches. In 1912 some ulterior-minded folks were finding the old pines handy for firewood and an edict went out to arrest anyone found chopping down the Park pines.
Mrs. Ethel Pierce who has helped much with this chapter, remembers that during the 1920's there was a summer colony of about a dozen families living in tents and cabins on the high and behind the Park. It was a delightful spot on a sunny day and when it rained, the Park "family" gathered in the Pavilion for an afternoon of games, song-fests and impromptu dancing. Another improvised and very exciting entertainment consisted of a wide crack in the rear of the theater through which a good portion of the night's program could be viewed and where the mothers of the little colony, their youngsters safe in bed, settled down each evening. This lasted happily until one night a large personage ensconced herself before the widest part of the crack which so exasperated another member of the unseen audience that she used a hat pin with satisfactory results. But the ensuing pandemonium roused the Park personnel and the crack was boarded up the next day
The Park and the trolleys are but a memory now. To today's youth, they are something from the dark ages. But it constituted the summer's best entertainment in a day when the wireless and movies had hardly reared their distracting heads above the horizon. The last trolley line in Vermont was the Springfield Terminal Railway from Springfield to Charles- town, N. H. This exchanged its overhead wires for a diesel
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engine in 1956 and old No. 16 passenger and mail car in service since 1926, was trucked to a Connecticut museum. Today the line handles only freight.
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CHAPTER IX
TRAVEL, ROADS, BRIDGES, RAILROADS, AIRPLANES.
AUTOMOBILES
Today each September sees a fantastic cavalcade of ancient cars from Maine to California chug smoothly along hard topped roads as the Glidden Tour of Antique cars put-puts to Wood- stock, Vermont, a replica of the first tour in 1904. For many old cars are still owned in the land, which, their brass gleaming and their paint glittering, start bravely out on this annual parade which leaves bystanders agape or fondly reminiscing. Few people today remember those 1904 vintages of windshield- less two-seaters but there was a day when those same Packards, Maxwells and Premiers were not only the height of fashion but also of courage. By 1910 there were fifty intrepid folks in Rockingham who had discarded the horse for the gas buggy. By 1916 many popular makes were advertised by local dealers such as Chalmers, King and Reo. And of course the Ford, like the poor in the Bible, was always with us. The Model-T worked its gears by foot power but the wonderful Model-A which appeared in 1927, came out with a hand shift. In 1919 there were 7,771,000 passenger cars in the United States and ten years later, 23,121,000. Motor vehicle registrations in 1952 were 53,294,000, a gain of two million in ten years. (Standard International Encyclopedia, Page 392, Vol. 2.) The number of vehicles counted at U. S. 5 in Rockingham jumped from 138,840 in June of 1954 to 162,420 in June of the next year, a 17% increase.
Of the many people in town who mastered the gentle art of driving something besides a democrat and a matched pair, several decades ago, probably Charles Gates could speak with the most authority as he catered to the whims of those early cars as well as the later ones for more than 40 years in his garage on Westminster Street, until he retired in 1945. At that time the garage was taken over by Harrison Kingsbury of Saxtons River, was later owned by Earl Osgood of the same village and was then vacant for the first time since it was built until it was taken over in 1955 by a new store, Meatland.
Charlie owned and operated Gates Garage which was built back in 1906 when the aggregate number of cars in town was five or maybe six. The first car which his garage sold, he said, was a two-cylinder Ford which cost $1,200 minus any top or windshield. These came extra. But almost everyone drove
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a Ford if he drove at all for a Ford was "the car that laughs at hills and rides like a yacht." Doubtless it still does and while many of its early owners probably knew little about a yacht, they soon learned! Few oceans had more undulations than the first roads with their thank-you-marms of fifty years ago when the first car to be driven from coast to coast was manned by Capt. Nelson Jackson of Burlington, Vermont, whose Winton in 1903 finished a transcontinental tour from San Francisco to New York in 64 days.
Mr. Gates had been tinkering with road machines of one kind or another since he was seventeen when he ran a bicycle shop next to his future garage, at the same time running a painting business. When he became convinced that cars, not bicycles, were the coming thing in the new age of miracles, he sold his paint business, shifted from bikes to cars and built a garage to house them. That was back in the days of the long haul with the new Fords as they struggled to the White Moun- tains and back over roads artisanned for horses. They didn't make many miles a day and their overnight stops were worth several dollars, three at least, to a garageman, one for storage of their car overnight, one to have the mud scraped off and another to have the brass shined up, not as casy as it sounds for there were no mechanics and a novice learned as he went along of the mysterious insides of Fords and Reos.
Of course no one took the car business seriously at first and no one would dream of trying to get anywhere in the winter with anything but a horse. In 1915 no one dreamed of going more than a few miles when out for a ride at any time of year. So Gates Garage housed all the town cars from October until mud time was over which might be May, making for a short motoring season. Out came the sleighs and pungs and the buffalo robes when the first snow fell. So Charlie, as everyone still calls him, like many other garage men and carriage makers -Frank Wheeler was doing the same thing in Rockingham, Old Town-fell back on his years as a painter and spent the winter sprucing up the cars in his garage for private garages were something still in the future.
Then there was the day when the first starters arrived on ·cars and you didn't have to risk a sprained wrist cranking her up. Motors came out from under the body and went under the hood and you didn't have to "get out and get under" every time your Ford-it didn't have to be an Oldsmobile-squatted sulkily in the road. Charlie remembers when he drove the first taxi in town, in 1906, called a "livery car" and he charged ten dollars to go to Brattleboro or Keene. The hacks from the livery stable hung on for another ten years but there was stiff competition from the cars "on hire," until the tax fee became too high to make any money.
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All the early makes of cars passed through Gates Garage for Charlie handled the agency for all of them, Fords, Jacksons, Overlands, Studebakers, Rickenbackers, Chevrolets, Buicks, Durants and Hudsons. The year 1937 was the high spot in the car business when 254 new and used cars passed through his hands and in 1924 he sold 118 new Model-T Fords. He did all the repair work with 16 men to help him and at that, there was a lot of repair work which a man had to do on his own machine when out on the road, with his repair kit always ready to patch the inevitable blowouts. World War I and the prices which the OPA set on cars made business bad and there were more cars sold in 1906 than in 1945 according to the popu- lation rise. In 1902 began the campaign of the Automobile Association of America for better cars and to safeguard those who drove them, a necessary combination when night drivers were obliged to "send up a rocket every mile, wait ten minutes for the road to clear, then proceed carefully, blowing their horns and shooting off Roman candles." (Paul Kneeland in Boston Globe, February 17, 1952.)
Today cars are hard to sell, too. Probably the salesman who piled up one of the best records was Albert J. Doyle who has worked for many years for Smith Auto Co. In 1933, in the midst of the depression, he won a contest for selling more used cars in New England than anyone else. In two months he sold and delivered thirty cars and he is always glad to show you the watch he received as a prize besides several hundreds dollars worth of clothing. Mr. Doyle says today that people have "champagne appetites and beer pocketbooks" which results in some of the cars which they buy, rebounding on them.
Before there were cars, there were bicycles and people even took trips of a hundred miles on those big, high-wheeled affairs and later, on the lower bikes. Charlie Gates said he was only 18 when he cycled from Bellows Falls to Troy, N. Y. in three days of ploughing through sandy roads. The new "lower" bikes were called The Safety and a trip from here to Springfield, Mass. took only a day "with no cement roads, either." Two additions were made to his garage, a 95-foot strip in the rear and a 53-foot ell on the southeast end. At the age of 86, Mr. Gates is enjoying his retirement at his home upstairs beside his old garage.
About 1914 Mrs. Fred Babbitt said she used to chug around in an electric runabout that steered with a lever. Someone has said that these conveyances "looked like beautiful little greenhouses sneaking silently down the streets." Their bodies were mostly glass and each model "had at least one cut glass vase for roses." In 1915 Harry Elliott had a Model-T which he used to park in front of the Trust Company. One Saturday night he found it missing. It turned up the next day down near Keene, in a state of collapse as you might say was Harry. In
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this "daring robbery," the thieves drove right through the square and under the unsuspecting nose of Officer Mckinnon. It finally smashed head-on into a stone wall, broke the wishbone and bent the front fenders. It wasn't much of a car when Harry got to Keene.
At that time there were about 200 cars in town and 75 of them were Fords, that ubiquitious, cheap little car, the dream of the man who had "hoed ten thousand miles" and who only wanted to make some machinery to replace the hoe! But he organized the Ford Motor Co. in 1903 and was America's first billionaire. The first motorized truck arrived in Bellows Falls in 1917 when Robertson Paper Co. put their horses, some of them at least, out to pasture. It came through Frank De- Forge's Garage and since it couldn't be shipped by freight, Frank went to Pennsylvania after it by train and drove it home in four days. The town had its first automobile show that same year, the year that Bert Haines drove around in a classy looking Allen and E. K. Chase started his famous races on an Indian motorcycle. The age of motors had arrived. One of the earliest cars was the red Ford of Dr. A. C. Liston in which he proudly posed for his picture in 1908. It cost him $750 and he said it was worth every penny of it, with tires like buggy wheels, head lights like brakeman's lanterns and a horn that you squeezed by hand-from the outside. It was later sold to Lewis C. Lovell who used it to climb the wood roads to his mountain pastures.
In 1920 the average American car boasted 18 horsepower; in 1940, it was 85 and in 1952, 120. By 1956 it was practically a jet plane with motors nearing 300 horsepower. But the first car in town is said to have been a Stanley Steamer belonging to Dr. Lawrence Miner who bought it together with Carl Isham. Dr. Hazelton had two electrics, one so narrow that he used to ride up Rockingham Street on the sidewalks and scare the pedestrians out into the road. The drawbacks of electrics was that the batteries had to be recharged frequently and outside of town, there was no power and often the good doctor sat be- side the road and waited until rescued while his patients also waited or quietly expired. Speed was not one of the things for which the little electric was famous and the horse still had a lot to say about things. Once Dr. Hazelton's daughter and her pony staged a runaway-and the good doctor couldn't do a thing about it as she whizzed past him. What happened is not clear but she is still alive to tell about it.
Many interesting tales could be told about the competition between the early cars and Old Dobbin who refused, for a number of years, to be pushed out of the picture. In 1915 the well- known veterinary, Dr. F. C. Wilkinson who still did his traveling safely behind a horse, was called to Westminster. He took along his son Harold and as they plodded home after dark
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near the Drislane farm, one of the contraptions which the doctor, probably called "those cussed gas buggies" passed them. This so upset the horse that he reached for the sky and came down on the ground, on his side, helpless, in a field. The doctor and his son had to get help to get the horse up on his feet again. In 1918 Walter Glynn, then of Saxtons River, got his car mixed up with the nag of Door Thayer who was not yet sold on gasoline transportation. They collided on the Barber Park Road near the Herbert Rhodes farm and Mr. Thayer was tossed into the highway while his frightened steed made down the trolley tracks, head-on into an on-coming car- "offering to shake hands," the conductor said-damaging the car and breaking his back so that he had to be shot. Law suits followed fast and furious as Mr. Thayer sued Mr. Glynn, who was a close friend, and the railroad also suing him. At county court, the verdict was returned for the plaintiff. Cars were always in the wrong. A mounting rash of accidents made clear the fact that all vehicles drawn by horses should carry lights after dark and State's Attorney Gibson campaigned rigorously for a law to that effect. And while there were prob- ably not yet more cars than horses, they did outnumber tele- phones on farms by more than 33% in New England about that time.
By 1929 horses were giving way to motors although D. L. Snow was still selling fruit and vegetables behind Dobbin and George D. French had a steed which he said was a colt -- well, 25 years ago but which he still cherished. Albert Rice, Francis Reynolds and Gus Parker were among the last die-hards to stick to horse flesh and someone lamented the fact that E. R. Yates' trotter and sulky was no longer seen on the road and that Gene Cray and Lew Lovell had "backslidden in favor of autos and flying machines." The horse received one of his final knock-out blows when the American Express Co. exchanged their heavy dray horses for "classy trucks." Cars were soon to far outnumber the faithful horse.
THE BELLOWS FALLS AND SAXTONS RIVER STREET RAILWAY
Today Ray Hemingway drives a station wagon bus between Saxtons River and Bellows Falls. Contemporaneous with the first cars were the trolleys, but before the Bellows Falls and Saxtons River Street Railway existed, Baxter Walker drove a stagecoach from the River to meet trains at the Falls. In April, 1915, running competition to the trolleys, Rockingham's first "jitney service" was initiated. Louis Burnett had a Buick truck with seats facing each other in which, for a dime, he carried to Bellows Falls those who craved to see The Vir- ginian at the Grand Theater or who wished to buy their Easter hats at the Day, Pollard Emporium.
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"Business is good on some trips," Burnett said, and when it wasn't, he added, he just removed the seats and was in the trucking business. Possibly the trucking turned out to be the most lucrative as the TIMES suggested that he "expected to get a share of the irrigation business between Alstead and. Bellows Falls after May 1st when the saloons in North Walpole are closed."
When Pine Hill was being graded and the tracks laid for the new electric road, various law suits flew back and forth. Some property owners on the hill sued the town for damaging their land. The town, however, would doubtless have been justified in suing certain people whose children piled up rocks on the curve of the track at the foot of the hill, derailing more than one car. When the road was built, it was planned to have. an extension to Cambridgeport and Grafton but that dream was never realized and Saxtons River always remained "the end of the line." Because of the railway, Saxtons River acquired the benefits of electric power before either of the other two villages. The first manager of the road was Joel Holton and in 1910 the general manager was W. J. Sanford who ran a poeti- cal contest that spring on the delights of the trolleys with a prize of ten dollars for the best entry. And it might help, he suggested, if the contestants first took a ride on the cars!
The stockholders in the railway originally included 40 local people but the stock was eventually bought up by the builders of the road. John F. Alexander and Calvin L. Barber were local directors and the first motor men were Charles Copley and John Morgan with H. E. Dean and George Alexander, conductors. There was always a sign up front which read DO NOT TALK TO THE MOTORMAN-the man to whom everyone told their troubles. The rails used in the construction of the road were old ones from the Boston and Maine Railroad for which it acted as a feeder, carrying people and property from the depot to the Park and Saxtons River. The first car was 35 feet long, the longest, in fact, in Vermont and was con- vertible, closed in winter, open in summer. Soon after dynamos were installed by the Bellows Falls Electric Light Co., opera- tions were started with two passenger cars, a trailer, flat car and freight motor as rolling stock.
Tickets were a quarter for a round trip between the Falls and the River or 15c each way. You could ride to Gageville from the Falls for a nickel or you could spend the whole day at the Park on Labor Day or the Fourth of July and return for 15 cents. The first ticket office was behind the C. L. Barber house, now called the Shepardson house on the corner of Henry and Atkinson Streets where Miss Ada Williams worked and later married Mr. Sanford, the manager of the road. One of Miss Williams' duties was to wash the lamp chimneys each day- in the office, that is, which was in the small building previously
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used as a store by Mason Bros. Music Store together with John B. Bronson and his sewing machines.
The first car making the complete trip from Bellows Falls to Saxtons River left town on June 29, 1900 with invited guests, village officials and several old residents. Saxtons River was waiting in force and greeted the arrival of the car with church bells, whistles and even the village cannon making its stentorian voice heard. The band outdid itself and everyone in town was on hand, cheering and waving. Passengers were treated to ice cream and lemonade on the lawn of Mr. and Mrs. W. C. Campbell and Walter Glynn gave the speech of welcome. Much credit was given by President Holton of Putney to Mr. Barber for the success of the road, whose farm was to become the popu- lar amusement center for 25 years. Two cars at that end of the line filled up with women and children who had a free ride to the Park and back again. All in all, it was a gala event in the opening of the road. In 1914 Saxtons River acquired a new trolley station. Part of the success of the Park was always said to be due to the B.F.&S.R. Street Railway, which always ran on time unless a thunder storm blew out a dynamo or a blizzard got too much for the snowplow.
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